Wry, clever and cool

A driven George Clooney tells Marianne Gray how important it is not to get typecast

George Clooney arrived on British screens more or less a fully formed star. He had spent years trapped in American sitcom hell and by the time we got him he was in his mid-thirties playing the debonair Dr Doug Ross in the hit series ER.

We never saw him as a young hopeful in embarrassments like The Return of the Killer Tomatoes or Murder, She Wrote, a TV show he describes as a junkyard for actors who become skeletons of themselves. He was delivered to us as Gorgeous George, the actor who could do no wrong.

‘Listen,’ Clooney comments amiably, when I meet him just before Christmas, ‘I was unfamous for a very long time and I’m enjoying being where I am now. I know that eventually my career will plummet — all careers do — so I’m going to savour this while it’s going strong. I’ve still got good screen hair so I must make the most of it before it falls out! A few years from now I’ll probably be the centre box of some TV trivia question show.’

Unlikely.

Clooney, 50 next year, has been in three ‘hot’ films released here in the past four months — voicing the animated film version of Roald Dahl’s book Fantastic Mr Fox, the far-fetched comedy based on Jon Ronson’s book The Men Who Stare at Goats, which Clooney’s company Smokehouse Productions produced, and this month Up in the Air, a light comedy about a dark subject in which he plays an admirable antihero, Ryan Bingham, a firer-for-hire, flown in by spineless managers to execute their lay-offs and redundancies for them.

‘He’s a corporate hatchet man who avoids emotional ties by travelling constantly and feeding his obsession with frequent-flier miles,’ says Clooney of his role, written for him by Jason Reitman (Juno) and playing opposite Vera Farmiga (The Departed) and newcomer Anna Kendrick.